REVENGE OF THE NICE

I live on the left hand corner of a T intersection in a quiet little exurban town in the middle of nowhere. My street has mainly families like mine on it – with kids of varying ages, married couples, some stay-at-home-moms, and some working moms. All the dads work.

A little over a year ago, a commercial developer decided to build a strip mall across the street from me along the long top bar of the T, to take advantage of traffic from the main drag, one block farther east. His parking lot connects the main drag and my quiet street. While the strip mall and parking lot were under construction, he used a great deal of heavy earth-moving equipment, including a big, yellow steam shovel type of tractor. It’s the kind of equipment that little boys dreamt of driving back in the 60’s, and I knew the moment I saw it, it would be a hazard for curious children if it got left unsecured overnight.

After so many years of peace and quiet, all the construction noise took a little getting used to, but I chose not to make a fuss. Construction continued for several months, with all manner of nasty vehicles and truckloads of raw materials running up and down the street, sometimes well into the night. Finally, the building was finished, the lot graded, and I figured we had heard the last of the constant clanking, banging, and earth shaking roars of large engines.

There was just one little problem. The developer parked the steam shovel at the exact center of the top of the T, just a little on the pavement. And left it there. For a week. In the summer, when the residents here take leisurely walks with their dogs, their children, and their grandchildren. The steam shovel was a magnet for everything on four legs, and even more attractive to children. When kids would run over to the mini-mart for a quick gallon of milk, few of them could resist stopping off to examine, or even carefully monkeying around on the steam shovel, sitting on the seat, poking buttons and so forth. It was also an extremely dirty, greasy eyesore. None of the neighbors were happy about it being there; we grumbled in passing and on the phone with one another.

I found the developer one day and asked when we could expect his equipment to be removed, and I pointed out that it was becoming kind of a problem. He looked at me, as most people look at middle-aged mothers, as if I had an IQ smaller than my shoe size, and gruffly replied that he’d move it when he was damn well good and ready to do so. I frowned and told him I didn’t think it was very responsible to leave an attractive hazard sitting partially in the street, and reminded him that he had agreed to disrupt our residential neighborhood as little as possible with his construction. He just turned away.

Well, that told me that talking to him was not going to do any good, so I set about thinking of ways to make my point non-verbally. I thought about splashing it with red paint (washable) to make it look like someone had cut themselves on it and perhaps causing him to worry about liability. Too dramatic. I thought of spray-painting it with some surveyor’s neon paint, but it turned out that stuff is permanent, and I really didn’t want to get in trouble with the police for vandalism. I just wanted to make my point.

Out my windows, I watched big, hearty, macho construction workers come and go. I watched the super heavy-duty, mud-encrusted pickups driven by those macho workers race up and down my little kid-intensive street. I quietly fumed and pondered as another week of staring out at that ugly steam shovel passed by. And then inspiration struck.

The next morning, a Wednesday, a little after 10, I took my basket of supplies, trotted over to the steam shovel and set to work. I decorated that steam shovel with 20 large bunches of pink plastic flowers from an old living room arrangement, twining the wired stems firmly around various steel structures. I wound pink crepe paper streamers, leftover from my daughter’s birthday party, around the roll cage part of it. I tied a large pink crepe paper bow on the door handle. Then I taped a large sign, on pink posterboard, to the steering wheel. The sign said, in very flowery calligraphy, “PLEASE TAKE ME HOME. I MISS MY FRIENDS. LOVE, PEACHES.” And then I ambled back home.

When noon rolled around, the construction workers jumped in their macho pickup trucks and started heading out for lunch. As they passed the steam shovel, I heard squealing brakes, and I looked out my window to see what their responses would be. Most of them were agog, not daring to go to close to “Peaches” now that she’d been feminized. I wondered if they thought they’d become “girly” if they touched her. None of them took any of the decorations off, no one removed the sign, they just walked around Peaches the Steamshovel, looking at the pinkerization that I had done. They took off their baseball caps and scratched their heads. They looked at each other and shrugged. Then they got back in their trucks and, more slowly than usual, drove off.

Within three hours, Peaches had been removed, a lone, sad bunch of pink plastic hydrangeas laying in the ditch and a few ruts in the dirt the only evidence she’d ever been there. My daughter told me that she saw some pink flowers along the roadside on her bus ride home, so I guess that whoever came to get her took her back to the yard in all her female glory for others to enjoy, the wind stealing a few souvenirs along the way.

Since then, we’ve only had one small problem with equipment on our residential street. A couple of months after Peaches’ departure, a landscaper’s truck and trailer parked right behind my driveway, making it hard for my oldest son, a relatively new driver, to back out of the driveway. I tied a bunch of pink and purple plastic tulips and a small note to the driver’s side door handle with some pink curling ribbon – curled, of course – requesting that he park in the mall lot henceforth, as he was working for them. We haven’t had a single problem since.